Legal Dramas, Mad Men, and the Evolution of the Fictional Female Lawyer

Media Gallery

It seems a lifetime ago now that L.A. Law introduced us to the eligible female lawyer. A decade later it would be Ally McBeal. Characters portrayed by Susan Dey and then Calista Flockhart excited an ambition in some young women to become high-powered legal professionals. But mostly it was an opportunity to wear expensive skirt suits and eat sushi for lunch. Don’t take my word for it. As a junior high student, I recall at least half a dozen girls dressing up as lawyers for Halloween each year. You could say it was the stereotypically overachieving Asian American’s version of a “sexy witch.” Ask them how important these TV role models were.

Today’s crop of legal dramas on TV still feature young professional women, but their eligibility (for sex) is ambiguous and their career ambitions border on Machiavellian. Exhibits A, B and C: Damages, The Good Wife and the rotating cast of assistant D.A.s in the Law & Order franchise all feature characters rivaling for power, regardless of whomever they’re sleeping with.

Recently, I had a chance to talk with Helen Wan, the author of The Partner Track, a novel whose protagonist fits somewhere in that caucus of women, adding racial and generational conflict to the trope. Wan’s book follows the travails of Ingrid Yung, an Asian-American ace, an HR wet dream, making her way in and out of and back in to the good graces of the corporate law complex as a high-powered mergers and acquisitions attorney.

Ingrid is a senior associate at the corporate law firm Parsons Valentine & Hunt LLP, based in New York City. At the offset the firm is poised to bring a Big Energy (SunCorp) acquisition to market, and a senior partner, Marty Adler, assigns Ingrid to the account. This sets in motion Ingrid’s upward propulsion to partner status. While real life law firms and law publications like Cleary Gottlieb and Above the Law are mentioned to give the story a dimension of believability, Wan’s done an incredible job fabricating up a thorough legal overture, including legal clauses most readers won’t have ever heard of. It’s worth reading for the pulp. In the narrative’s central deal, the candidly overachieving, unironically bourgeois Ingrid is haunted by the context of her success. Aerobic episodes of legal discursives are punctuated by answering machine messages left in Mandarin by her mother begging daughter to call or come back home already. Meanwhile, she bristles with lunchroom politics, opting for lasagne over teriyaki, and settles in with a Soho-appropriate glass of Pinot Grigio after a particularly grueling shift in the Old Boy’s Club.

After playing political jenga with competitors, colleagues, peers and executive secretaries, Ingrid is unceremoniously (and shockingly) passed up for that partner seat and dismissed from the firm, dealing a huge shock to her and all around her. It’s only after all this, however, in her final deliverance, that Ingrid makes The Partner Track a tale of redemption.

“I didn’t want her to get married, or discovered she liked dogs enough to start a dog-walking business,” Wan says, when we chatted recently about avoiding the pitfalls of a women-positive ending. I ask her how she planned on giving Ingrid a happy ending without undermining the bad guy profession she happened to excel at. [Spoiler Alert] “I couldn’t have her go back to her job.” I add that she also couldn’t work client-side for Big Energy, either. Instead, Ingrid becomes a media sensation after the public dismissal from Parsons Valentine & Hunt, and starts her own firm; she eschews office events at country clubs originally formed exclusively for white men, opting instead to accompany her staff on The Cyclone at Coney Island.

“Lawyers are probably the most reviled profession in pop culture, or at least for as long as I’ve been paying attention to media tropes,” Wan freely admits. She realizes the moral ambiguity of the profession is at odds with the redemptive tale of a woman of color breaking professional barriers, but she also wanted to avoid chick lit tropes like marriage or relationships, and the infantilization of female professionalism (e.g. dog-walking as a solution to “real world” stress).

“I hope I made her back story in the beginning vivid enough that the reader would understand Ingrid might not have planned it, but she’s damned good at her job. I wanted to make that [success] really complicated for her character.”

Still, Wan admits that when shopping the book, editors were initially irked by the fact that this was a story about a lawyer. Would the reader empathize with such a loathsome profession? Would it be different if Ingrid were, say, a Creative Director at an ad agency?

It’s one thing to watch an equally misogynistic office culture in a show like Mad Men, for example, which gets away with its false starts in political messaging because it is set in the near past and promotes advertising as Art. The same dynamics set in a contemporary law firm are more difficult to tolerate but no less self-aware in this novel. And yet we delight in the revulsion of these stuffy male characters that prevent women from succeeding. Many of those men still flourish, and are far from fictional.

“Everyone knows about those senior partners, the older generation of attorneys, who still don’t know how to use email. They have assistants take dictations on Dictaphones.” As we speak about how media-savvy lawyers are in actuality, Wan suggests the generational divide represents an evolution in the broader culture of legal professions. In fact, the media is a secondary character in The Partner Track, whereby reputation, public appearances, and social scandals outweigh the gravity of actual law when it comes to professional success. The media is on Ingrid’s side when shit hits the fan at Parsons Valentine & Hunt, so whether the law complex forgives or accepts an independent woman is moot. Given how repulsed the typical public will be by the evil lawyer, how entertained we are by the workplace misogyny of a sixties ad agency, how complacent we are to a 21st century corporate law firm that vaunts the sexual eligibility of women, it’s appropriate that the winner in The Partner Track should simply be the most likeable woman.

Events

How does history – particularly the history of war, colonialism, and marginalization – impact the work of Asian American poets across time and space? How does language act as a haunting space of intervention and activism? Poet and scholar Jane Wong raised these questions with her digital multimedia project, The Poetics of Haunting. For the last workshop event of 2017, Wong and poets Carlina Duan, ChristineShan Shan Hou, and Muriel Leung read work and share images that boldly invoke historical and familial ghosts so that we may feel their presence.
RESERVE A SEAT!
$5 SUGGESTED DONATION | OPEN TO THE PUBLIC
Carlina Duan’s debut collection of poetry I Wore My Blackest Hair (Little A, 2017) wrestles with the growing pains of Chinese American girlhood and racial consciousness. Franny Choi writes, “In I Wore My Blackest Hair, [Duan’s] speaker navigates diaspora and its incumbent losses — of family, of language, of face — with unflinching care, revealing complex textures and concrete magic.” Carlina is a 2016 Fulbright grant recipient and an MFA Candidate at Vanderbilt University. Her work has been published in Uncommon Core, Tinderbox Poetry Journal, and Berkeley Poetry Review, among others. Check out her poems about her father, silence, and the echo of “Who Let the Dogs Out” on a schoolbus in The Margins.
A garden, an intimate and intense look at being a lonely girl, and a shape-shifting feminist spiritual quest of imagined histories, Christine Shan Shan Hou’s Community Garden for Lonely Girls (Gramma Press, 2017) creates strange and mutable new generational mythologies. The Poetry Project writes, “Community Garden for Lonely Girls invites readers of all gender persuasions to momentarily suspend the Enlightenment imperative to cultivate their individual plots and embrace the feeling of being disposable — and disposed into — a mass flowerpot.” Work from Community Garden for Lonely Girls appears in Jane Wong’s Poetics of Haunting Digital Project: “We talk over each other all the time. We exchange ghosts in the details.” Christine is a poet and artist based in Brooklyn, NY. Her previous publications include “I'm Sunlight” (The Song Cave 2016), C O N C R E T E S O U N D (2011) a collaborative artists’ book with artist Audra Wolowiec, and Accumulations (Publication Studio 2010).
Muriel Leung’s Bone Confetti (Noemi Press, 2016) is an arresting account of loss and the unresolved nature of mourning and making art. Publisher’s Weekly calls it, “an elegant, elegiac debut collection set in a haunted and highly ritualized space.” Cathy Park Hong writes, “Leung’s poems can be unbearably intimate yet also epic, traversing into the speculative and gothic, as she animates her grief into a macabre and exquisitely haunted underworld…”; Hyperallergic writes “She meets the violence of her grief with poems populated by holograms, robots, and ghosts.” A Pushcart Prize nominated writer, her writing can be found or is forthcoming in Gulf Coast, Drunken Boat, The Collagist, Fairy Tale Review, and others. She is a contributing editor to the Bettering American Poetry anthology and is also Poetry Co-Editor of Apogee Journal. Currently, she is pursuing her PhD in Creative Writing and Literature at University of Southern California. She is from Queens, NY.
Jane Wong is a poet, scholar and the creator of the Poetics of Haunting digital project. Inspired by her scholarly manuscript on the of ghosts in contemporary Asian American poetry, Going Toward the Ghost, the project grew into a TED Talk, a digital collection of haunting poems, a record of with conversations with Bhanu Kapil and Sally Wen Mao, and a piece written in conversation with Theresa Hak Kyung Cha’s archive. Of her powerful debut poetry collection, Overpour (Action Books, 2016) Full Stop writes, “There isn’t [a page] without arresting imagery and a suggestion of forceful, generative life.” A former Kundiman and Fulbright Fellow, Wong is an Assistant Professor at Western Washington University. Check out her poem from Overpour, “Pastoral Power” and her conversation with Sally Wen Mao about the book in The Margins.
NOTE ON ACCESSIBILITY
*The space is wheelchair accessible. Direct elevator from ground floor to 6th floor.
*We strongly encourage all participants of the space/event to be scent-free.
If you all have any other specific questions about accessibility, please email Tiffany Le at tle@aaww.org with any questions on reserving priority seating.
This event will be livestreamed on the Asian American Writers’ Facebook page.
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A special discussion about music and the ghosts of America’s racial past featuring two highly acclaimed authors. A murder mystery, a ghost story, and two cultural tourists collide in Hari Kunzru’s spellbinding novel White Tears (Knopf, 2017), which connects contemporary cultural appropriation and white hawkers of black music with the history of racism and the forgotten geniuses of American music and Delta Mississippi Blues. Pulitzer-Prize winning writer Margo Jefferson’s classic work of cultural criticism, On Michael Jackson (Pantheon, 2005), a complex and tender portrait of the King of Pop, reckons with child stardom and the specter of racial ghosts that shaped his celebrity. She’ll read from her evolving work on Michael Jackson and current writing on jazz singers. Moderated by Kevin Nguyen, editor at GQ.
RESERVE A SEAT!
$5 SUGGESTED DONATION | OPEN TO THE PUBLIC
Seth and Carter, two young music-obsessed culture vultures, find themselves thrust into a murder mystery involving the ghost of a blues musician that takes Seth to Mississippi, unraveling the depth of the history of racism and exploitation in music. The New York Times writes, “White Tears is distinguished by a knowledge of blues at its deepest, a gift for observation at its most penetrating and stretches of plain old marvelous writing.” Slate raves, “Call it a ghost story or a rumination on art, possession and responsibility—or both—it has all the force of a truth that can be neither denied nor buried—at least not for long.” Hari Kunzru is the author of four previous novels: The Impressionist, Transmission, My Revolutions, and Gods Without Men. He is the recipient of fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation, the New York Public Library, and the American Academy in Berlin. Check out his piece written in response to F.N. Souza’s painting “Degenerates” in The Margins.
The winner of a Pulitzer Prize for criticism, Margo Jefferson previously served as book and arts critic for Newsweek and the New York Times. Her writing has appeared in, among other publications, Vogue, New York Magazine, The Nation, and Guernica. Her memoir, Negroland, received the 2016 National Book Critics Circle Award for Autobiography. She is also the author of On Michael Jackson and is a professor of writing at Columbia University School of the Arts.
Kevin Nguyen is an editor at GQ Magazine, where he writes about books, music and popular media. White Tears is his favorite book he read in 2017 “by a mile,” calling it a “tremendous, smart, weird book.” Kevin was formerly a book reviewer for Grantland, and has published in The Paris Review, The New Republic, The Atlantic, and The Millions.
This event will be livestreamed on the Asian American Writers’ Facebook page.
NOTE ON ACCESSIBILITY
*The space is wheelchair accessible. No stairs. Direct elevator from ground floor to 6th floor.
*We strongly encourage all participants of the space/event to be scent-free.
If you all have any other specific questions about accessibility, please email Tiffany Le at tle@aaww.org with any questions on reserving priority seating.
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